The Virgin in the Garden (45 page)

The congregation swayed like a windy garden, tilting helmeted and floral heads to see the bride. They judged the dress, they were caught in the throat, they remembered their own moment, or looked forward to it, they divested the woman of her clothes in their mind’s eyes, they speculated about what she knew and did not know. She was their dubious innocence, their experience, come, coming or to come. Under a
Peter Pan cap of overlapping mauve grey petals Felicity Wells’s withered cheeks were wet. Alexander wondered why people should be so watery at weddings. He himself felt a certain satisfaction at his handiwork. He stepped forward to give this woman to be married to this man, and admired the effectiveness of his underpinning.

They stood before Mr Ellenby, their backs towards him, one white, one black, one airy and foaming, one dark, thick, slightly shining. They were both very solid. Stephanie’s dress was plain, no lace, no floss, nun-like under the falling triangle of veiling. But she had big round breasts under the bodice, and grand hips emphasised by the reasonably small circle of the waist. A child-bearing body, Alexander thought, sharing the general impression. He was moved by the exchange of vows, the old clear words, the uncompromising rhythms. Daniel spoke gruffly and Stephanie spoke clear and low. Mr Ellenby was solicitous, rather than clerically hooting. He had given great thought to the few words he felt bound to speak, on this occasion. He had read over and abandoned his usual remarks on the duties and delights of true Christian marriage, in favour of something new, vaguely literary in honour of the bride, and yet firmly reminding the bridegroom, he trusted, of those other vows he had embraced. With what he hoped was a graceful kind of tact Mr Ellenby proceeded from Spenser’s epithalamium and Milton’s celebration of the nuptial bliss of Adam and Eve to the biblical unions mentioned in the marriage service, including that primitive, first one. Eve was flesh of Adam’s flesh and bone of Adam’s bone. Man and wife was one flesh. The marriage service explicitly likened this union to the coming together of God and Man in the union of Christ and his Spouse, the Church. “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies,” St Paul said, and his saying was incorporated in the prayer book, “He that loveth his wife loveth himself: for no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church: for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.” Daniel when he was ordained had been enlisted to serve and protect the Church and Congregation who were the Spouse and Body of Christ. “They two shall be one flesh,” St Paul went on. “This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.” In a truly English way no one looked at anyone’s face during this exhortation. Descending his winding stair to the earth again Mr Ellenby reflected on Daniel’s impenetrable reception of his private remarks on St Peter, “himself a married man” according to Cranmer, whose pithy advice on the conversion of a pagan spouse was also included in the marriage service. “Even if any obey not the Word they may without the Word be gained by the conversion of the wives.” Or husbands, he had said to Daniel, who had said yes, bluntly, and no more.
Mr Ellenby sometimes suspected that Daniel himself was more than half pagan. The girl, whom he liked, was paradoxically more capable of understanding the drift of his, or St Paul’s, parabolic analogies than his grim curate. She had sat in his study and talked wisely of Herbert’s
Temple
. She had the essence of the matter in her, must have. In some further divine paradoxical way, her chaste conversation might indeed Christianise her uncouth partner. So much must be prayed for. He looked benignly upon that veiled white head, which harboured briefly savage thoughts about the essential shiftiness of argument by analogy. He blessed the couple, gracefully.

Marcus, at the back of the church, rested his face on the cold pillar from behind which Stephanie had overlooked Easter. At moments during the ceremony he consulted his watch: synchronicity was of the essence. He could see the rare old paintings above the arches. He could see the backs of Stephanie and Daniel. He could smell the strong smells of stephanotis, stone and wax in that place. He partly heard the vicar. He looked idly at the faded stains of charcoal, ochre, yellow and red, white and streaked cobalt. Ramping serpent, protesting Eve, recumbent Infant, dolorous Mother, Christ on the Tree, Christ in Wrath and Glory, the gaping, toothed Mouth of Hell. He yawned himself: nervous tension always made him sleepy. He checked his little dial again. Lately, since they had submitted to the apparent aimlessness of the proceedings, he and Lucas had had some startling successes with the transmission of very detailed mental pictures. In ten minutes or so he must make himself into a receiver, an antenna, an aerial. And after that, a transmitter. This was now done briefly and simply. Feet together, hands together, eyes closed, mind cleared, eyes opened, unfocused. Then the figure was called up and held, and held, geometric and pure. After a time the image rose, through and athwart it, an after-image on the screen of the mind’s eye, a projection. If possible, it was noted with pencil and paper. If not, committed to memory.

They had had no success with the transmission of words, nor with the transference of thoughts. Lucas felt that this was a failing. They should be able to communicate thoughts. Marcus himself had trouble about the definition of thoughts, in so far as these differed from words. A thought to Lucas might be said to be a truth about the biosphere, or the nature of consciousness, or the mental Plan for the evolution of the Species. Marcus asked how such a thought could be formulated for transmission, or, even more, apprehended. Lucas protested that what they did achieve was so pointless, so almost wilfully redundant. What use was a detail of a flowered counterpane in the Calverley Local Arts Centre? Or the Piranesi-like grilles and winches, transmitted by Marcus and clearly
received and sketched by Lucas, of the interior of Winifred Potter’s toasting-machine, stripped and partly dismantled for repair? Marcus had discovered, since the events of the Dropping Well and Owger’s Howe that he had a certain authority over Lucas that he took a cool, limited pleasure in exercising. The truth was that, message or no message, the things received were to him, in their limitations, manageable and pleasant. They were without the endless extension which so terrified him in the geometry which in its inhuman clarity also so consoled him: they were without the stammering, stumping thick wordy mess of human theory with which Lucas sometimes seemed to be positively belabouring his mind. They were shared yet separate, a detailed achievement yet pointless. He liked them the way they were. He therefore said to Lucas that he thought they were meant, that the meaning would be revealed as long as neither of them did anything to disturb the process. They had after all discovered that what they transmitted must come to them at random, for success must not be deliberately selected for didactic or “testing” reasons, must, as it were, almost be noted slyly and sideways, rather than stared out of countenance. This was so true that Lucas was forced to concede that they must go on as they were. He came up, a little later, with the hypothesis that they were being trained to remember, when their time came, some mental blueprint so precise, novel and intricate that an unprepared mind would be able neither to plot nor to recognise it. Marcus was partly pleased by this idea. Some such extreme, required precision, taking him over totally, would relieve him of many of his present anxieties. He still carried a dumb doubt as to the possibility of naming any of these things at all.

He didn’t altogether like the idea of transmitting things in the Church. Lucas’s identification of places of power had been sure enough, whatever qualifications one might want to make about what he did with this knowledge. The pillars and arms of stone had their own geometrical singing, which he could seize and see as a strong three-dimensional structure of interlocking lines and proportions, enclosing a space and a knot of intersections and yet also flowing away, doors, roofs, aisles, lines of arch-openings, into infinity. An infinite box is alarming. Then the field of flowery heads was a field of force that could powerfully intensify, he would guess, or distort, any message. Who knew, he thought, hearing and not hearing Mr Ellenby promulgating St Paul,
what
could get through. “O God, who by thy mighty power hast made all things of nothing,” said the Vicar, “who also (after other things set in order) didst appoint, that out of man (created after thine own image and similitude) Woman should take her beginning …”

The minute hand reached the appointed stroke. Marcus gathered and
excluded his body, looked into the dark and saw the swimming figure, in its no-space. Quiet deepened down. He waited.

He saw grasses. At first, briefly, he saw what he identified as the flower of lords and ladies, pointed pale green hood bowed over the purplish-brown spadix. This was replaced by the brilliantly clear grasses, a substantial handful of them, folded in some large green leaf, hanging their seeded ears out and low. They were varied kinds: fescues, rye grass, couch grass, meadow grass, hair grass, silky bent and quaking grass. They were silver-green, green-gold, pale and glassy, clear, new elm-leaf green and darker, bitter marshy-green. Fine lines down their stems glistened like stretched hairs: their finely swollen joints were glossy and shiny. If he had walked across a meadow, over a moor, by a river, he would have trodden down thousands. Here they seemed almost impossible in their intricacy and difference one from another. Also beautiful. Marcus was not one for beauty: he had early given that up as a value, in his imaginary mudscape: he had been frequently told to identify it, and had looked the other way. He did not now use the word to himself – in any case, he was occupied simply with seeing – but the pleasure that accompanied the seeing was an intense recognition of something satisfactory in colour, variety, form. Once or twice what Lucas had sent him had taken this particular form of a variety of related natural objects – eggs, vertebrae, stones and shells. On all occasions it had had this overplus of intense aesthetic pleasure. He did not know, indeed, he did not ask, if the feeling had been transmitted with the grasses, if it was Lucas’s or his own. As he watched, the grasses faded and for a time a strange transparent glassy shade of them hovered and trembled, each tube now defined as a translucent colourless cylinder by the light of its circumference, each seed, each sharp husk or falling spikelet revealed in its implicated, minute combing of particles. If one did not count such things, one frequently, Marcus frequently, remembered a large amount of exact numbers – of grasses, of ears, even of spikelets. Lucas would have preserved the grasses themselves for a check.

When the inner eye was emptied the primary geometry recurred, known, rather than seen – that is, Marcus sensed its shape rather as if he had heard it, or known it in the way one knows a chair one is about to occupy, or an obstacle one must avoid in the dark. He could have made it materialise, ropes or planes of looped fibre or tracery or light, but chose not, and cast about for something to send back through its funnel. His look lit on hell mouth on the opposite wall. He had started to scan and map and absorb it before the flicker of doubt about the propriety of the subject, and by then it had chosen itself. It yawned energetically, a
squared oval, red and deep and cracking between strongly curving portcullis tusks. Above it dragon nostrils flared and smoked and round black eyes bulged and stared. Around the lower jaws a crowd of black matchstick demons capered with curling tails and hooked pitchforks: between the teeth, in diminishing clouds, tiny figures flew like chaff, or lay baled, waiting the push. Marcus’s eidetic vision composed itself to include what it had not previously remarked: clouds of insect-like creatures somewhat realistically swarming over ears and nostrils as though the thing were a cow recumbent in a summer field: hairy ears pricked above the gateway: black bristles on ochre skin like slashes of infantile rain. It was a bit obvious, but even so, it would serve: Lucas was not to know which of the famous paintings he might select, even if he might have them, in general, in mind. Having fixed outlines and details Marcus went on staring and ceased attending, became blank and blanker, a way of work he had found peculiarly effective but had to recover from. So it was this time. When, suddenly, the pull between himself and fading hell mouth was relaxed he felt the church chill and heavy: its goings-on, which he had excluded, became oppressive.

They were singing “Teach me my God and King”, which Stephanie had chosen because it was by Herbert. Marcus turned his attention to the bride and groom, feeling his hand and cheek clammy on the now warmish stone.

He tried to make geometrical sense – a strong design – out of the fine, crisped, overlying triangles in the slopes of that veiling. His eye was always peculiarly attracted by transparencies over transparencies. But no sense could be made: the thing produced the random frustration of certain car or bus numbers he hated to travel with, near-weak, vague numbers, neither prime nor particularly variable, but with one or at most two possible threads of relation to tighten. It was a senseless cocoon. In retrospect an analogous dissatisfaction struck him about the crossings of the lines of the visionary grasses. They would not
go
. He did not in any way have it in him to do a little mental rearrangement, a little design of his own, using this material, to get it right. As it was, so he saw it. He began to be uncomfortable between this vague web and the very much overdesigned web of the church’s geometry, closed to convey openness, heavy to suggest lightness. He stared glumly at Daniel’s wide black back and was suddenly affected by it as he had been at the Coronation. Black absorbed light and did not reflect it. Black gave out radiant heat: it was dark and warm. The lines of energy, the fuzz of forces went into that solid flesh and ceased, coiled and rested, or so it seemed. He looked flatly at Daniel’s unbowed, unmoving shoulder-blades, humped a little below the cloth. He stopped thinking. He felt hungry. He yawned. He
struggled inside his best suit and good shoes and got up to follow the family to the vestry.